More than a third of India’s population of more than one billion people lives on less than $1 a day.
**India’s poor villagers wait in hope **
Tatikal is a village of a little over 3,000 people, some 140km (85 miles) east of the city of Hyderabad, one of India’s boom towns and the capital of Andhra Pradesh state. It is located just off a shiny new highway heading out from Hyderabad to the east coast. But as trucks roar down the highway, laden with cargo and headed out from Hyderabad to the ports, Tatikal has been left out of the region’s economic success. Part of Nalgonda district - one of the poorest in the state - the village and the surrounding area has experienced drought over the past eight years. With their farms drying up, many of the men and women of the village have been forced to migrate to other areas in search of work. In the worst instances, some of them have taken their lives. Poverty and debt have driven more than 150 farmers to commit suicide in this district in the past five years, officials say. Unofficial estimates place the figure far higher.
Jobs bill
Not surprisingly, Nalgonda is one of 200 districts across India which have been picked for the launch of India’s landmark Rural Employment Guarantee programme. On Thursday, Tatikal’s village council is going to meet to decide what projects they wish to take up under the plan. Top of the list is a canal to channel water into their parched fields from a nearby dam, and improving a road to the next village. Under the new programme, village councils vote on the projects and then villagers can apply to work on them, in exchange for wages. “They have the power to decide and then to execute the project,” explains Raghavendra Rao, the local government official who will monitor and supervise the programme in this village. The mood in the village is decidedly upbeat. “I am ready to work, in fact I want to work,” says 18-year-old Moduga Manamma, who also studies in a nearby school. “I don’t want handouts.” Moduga and her three sisters will be applying for work under the programme which guarantees 100 days of paid work to every household in the village.